Ok, I found out why inn wouldn’t upgrade – I’ve been using “timecaf” for the news spool. This is a semi-binary format which is supposed to be faster and more efficient than “tradspool”, which is the old single file per article in a directory structure based on the newsgroup names that we all used to know and love. “timecaf” creates just a few files per day with multiple entries in each file. I forget why I stopped using “tradspool” because this machine is way overpowered, maybe it was to see if we could use it at NCF.
Timecaf has been working pretty well for me, but evidently it has binary file offsets embedded in the file. And RedHat (oh, sorry, the “Fedora Community”) arbitrarily decided to enable “Large File Support” in between Fedora Core 3 and Fedora Core 4. This means that each record in each “timecaf” file has a 32 bit file offset attached to it, but the program is expecting a 64 bit file offset. That makes it impossible for the program to find the records.
I tried a few things, including compiling the source without large file support, and I still couldn’t get it to work. So I threw in the towel and blew away the whole news spool. After all, this is usenet, every idea comes around again in a few weeks anyway.